Christine Baranski could not actually get her mitts on the small book, but she got a charge from being just inches away. She was at the Morgan Library and Museum, getting a close look at Charles Dickens’s original manuscript for “A Christmas Carol.”
“You should warn people,” she said jokingly, “there’s an electric shock.”
She now has an intimate connection to “A Christmas Carol” through her collaboration with the Skylark Vocal Ensemble. On a recent recording with the group, she reads the text and they sing, well, carols; they will perform a live version at the Morgan on Dec. 18, as well as at the Breakers mansion in Newport, R.I., the following day.
Skylark has been experimenting with narrative forms for the past decade. “We’re trying to bring stories into programs, to give choral music a new context,” said Matthew Guard, the ensemble’s artistic director. A program in 2020, for example, featured two classic fairy tales, “The Little Mermaid” and “Snow White.” When he and the composer Benedict Sheehan decided to do a sequel of sorts to that project, an obvious theme quickly emerged.
“Choral music is never more interesting and powerful than at Christmastime for many people,” Guard said. “So it was like, ‘We need a Christmas story.’” And of course few are more popular than Dickens’s tale of the redemption of the coldhearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge.
Guard edited the story’s text from 30,000 words down to about 5,000, then he and Sheehan picked carols and Sheehan worked on the arrangements and underscoring. “When you’re in this alternate future where Tiny Tim has died,” Guard said by way of an example, “Benedict chose the ‘Coventry Carol,’ which is this haunting carol about Herod slaying little children.”
Baranski was a natural choice for a narrator. For one, she said, “I can relate to the story — I’m always a mean mom, I’m kind of Grinchy.” Mind you, she was referring to her roles in such holiday movies as “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square,” in which her character hands out eviction notices. Still, it’s worth noting that few women have performed as Scrooge, and Baranski’s honeyed mezzo-soprano particularly shines when she gets to his parts.
More important, she has deep musical roots. “I grew up listening to choral music because both my mother and father were singers in Polish groups that every year had a concert of Polish music and American music,” she said. Although she is best known for the series “The Good Fight” and “The Gilded Age,” Baranski can more than carry a tune, with credits like the Encores! production of “Follies” and “Sweeney Todd” at the Kennedy Center, and the film adaptation of “Mamma Mia!”
Something about the combination of spoken word and music especially touches her. “I thought, ‘I could just do this for the rest of my career,’” Baranski said of narrating a performance of Beethoven’s “Egmont” with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall two years ago.
Baranski and Skylark recorded their “Christmas Carol” album at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Mass. For her, reading the Dickens text was easier than doing the audiobook for “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” by the New York Times culture correspondent Jesse Green. “When it’s a first person, it’s just you talking the whole time, and you have to keep generating your own energy,” she said. “Whereas with this I’m setting the tone.” Modulating her intonation to suggest different characters, she added, “Suddenly there’s this voice, and suddenly there’s that voice.”
In the process, she essentially became a member of Skylark. “Although I don’t sing here, my voice is, in a way, a musical instrument,” Baranski said. “When I’m working with Matthew, he’s conducting me as much as he’s conducting the singers.” During the recording session, Guard would suggest, say, a bit more legato. “That’s a wonderful thing for an actor to work in tandem with a musician,” she said. “I was in service to the music, rather than vice versa.”
Guard, though, said that it’s kind of unclear who’s conducting whom. “We were so inspired by her approach to character that the carols have totally different musical influences,” he added. “We took this recording in very different directions stylistically, with each carol trying to live up to her character voices.”
You can see why Baranski’s role in “The Gilded Age,” the grand dowager Agnes van Rhijn, has been such a breakout: Preternaturally elegant and dry humored, she looked right at home ambling around the Morgan Library’s opulent rooms. The institution has been home to “A Christmas Carol,” which was published in 1843, since John Pierpont Morgan purchased the manuscript around 1900.
For about the past half century, the library has exhibited it during the holidays, each time opened to a different page. This year, visitors can look at Dickens’s revisions and chicken-scratch handwriting on Page 9 until Jan. 11. “I’ve talked with people who remember seeing it as a child, and now they bring their children and grandchildren,” said Philip Palmer, the library’s Robert H. Taylor curator and department head of literary and historical manuscripts.
Dickens’s story has long been a holiday favorite, but its redemptive arc of a ruthless man whose eyes finally open to the misery and poverty around him seems to hit especially hard during times of economic uncertainty.
“It’s very good timing, as we’re withholding food stamps from people in need,” Baranski said. “That kind of stinginess is still existing in the world, and also income inequality and all those issues. That’s why I think the Gilded Age is fascinating to people. They were robber barons but the difference, I think, is that they had a lot of money and they also cared about culture and giving back, and so we have the libraries and museums and concert halls that these men gave.”
Surveying Morgan’s library and study, Baranski marveled at the rich brocades and walls lined with leather-bound books. “We’re living in such a fast, image-driven world, but you’re in slow time when you’re in great museums or libraries,” she said. “You can feel yourself just go to that quieter place where I think all great art and creativity live.”
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